Description

Front: Tan paper with writing in pencil and blue ink, pink stamps in upper lefthand and lower righthand corners, and a pencil signature. Back: Blue cursive writing. Information Provided by Michael D. Bulmash: Four arrest warrants bearing Vilna (Vilnius: Lithuanian) Ghetto hand stamp in violet and red. Of the more than 60,000 Jews living in Vilnius before the German occupation, 21,000 were murdered over the course of the summer of 1941 by German troops, Einsatzgruppen A, and their Lithuanian collaborators. The effort was to establish a ghetto to imprison all Jews of Vilna and suburbs in the old Jewish quarter of the city. The area was split into two Ghettos, referred to as the Large and Small Ghettos, to implement the process of dehumanization, exploitation of the population for slave labor, and systematic extermination of all the Jewish residents. As in other ghettos created by the Nazis, conditions were intentionally overcrowded and unsanitary, with disease, hunger, and daily death as expectable outcomes. The Small Ghetto was liquidated by the end of October, 1941, leaving approximately 20,000 Jews remaining in the Large Ghetto. Jacob Gens was appointed head of the Ghetto administration. A former police chief, he set about establishing medical care, cultural and welfare systems for the Ghetto. Like Rumkowski in the Lodz Ghetto, he hoped that if Jews could prove themselves to be a productive workforce for the Nazis, then the Ghetto's destruction would be delayed. Germans continued to murder Ghetto Jews--typically the elderly and infirm--on a regular basis....

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Kenyon College

Record Harvested From

Ohio Digital Network